The publicity for the Hour of Code December 9th -15th has made me think about the role that coding has in schools of moving the relationship we expect students to have with technology in education from students being consumers of content to students being creators of content. It has also got me, as a child of the 70's and early 80's and a teacher from 1990 onwards, reflecting on how the pendulum swings in education. My first experiences of computers at school in about 1982 involved binary programming, punch cards and making something, possibly, move on the screen after a few hours. I have to admit that as a student, unlike some of my friends, I found this less than inspiring.When I began my teaching career things had moved on a little and we were using LOGO in class to try to get a Valiant Turtle to move along the ground which it did about 25% of the time before running out of power. For a long while LOGO commands were included in Mathematics curriculum in the UK and examples of good LOGO activities can be found on sites like nrich . However LOGO tended to be taught in a compartmentalised way rather than exploring the transdisciplinary potential of coding. More recently coding seems to have faded into the background as it has been assumed that it is no longer needed as it has become less important to understand how devices work in order to use them. So then we come to the present time when the pendulum looks to be moving back in the direction of coding being viewed as important again. Why should this be and what are the benefits?If we are to accept Alan Kay's definition that "Technology is anything invented after you were born",then Smart Phones are not technology for our Kindergärtners, tablets are not technology for our Pre K's and laptop computers and the internet do not count as technology for any student still in school. This is something anyone still proudly talking about a C21st education and C21st skills should bear in mind. The question then arises how do we use the ubiquitous tools of the late 20th and early 21st centuries most effectively to aid student thinking? One key use of the tools I would propose is to enable them to become tools of creation for students as opposed to tools of consumption. In order for this to happen effectively coding plays a key role in empowering students. Unlike my school day struggles with BASIC and punch cards, Scratch and similar programmes allow students to drag and drop blocks of code to quickly and simply achieve a motivating level of success. Sites like learn.code.org allow teachers and students to pick up the basics quickly. What is required is a commitment by schools to ensuring that coding is viewed as a C21st literacy and an empowering of students to become creative and skilled users of that literacy across all curriculum areas. In doing so we will unleash the power of the tools all students take for granted and place the ability to be truly creative in the hands of all of our students.

Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton in their excellent book New Kinds of Smart make the point that a common misconception about intelligence is that 'The mind and body are separate and truly intelligent activity is located in the mind.' Lucas and Claxton point out that our emerging knowledge about embodied cognition shows that the physical and the cognitive are deeply entwined.They conclude that, "It would be great if that deep coalition of the physical and the cognitive were to inform the curriculum in more schools.'As I wrote in my previous blog post, Design for Life (see below) this desire to ensure that students have ample opportunities to learn with their hands was one of the moving principles behind implementing a Kindergarten to Grade 5 Design course here at Nanjing International School.As the Design element of the curriculum has developed I've been inquiring more into the Maker Movement and Design Thinking and recently came across an amazing book Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering the Classroom by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary S. Stager, Ph.D. in addition to a great deal of practical advice, this book clearly outlines the potential of Making as a central aspect of the learning process but is also clear about some of the potential pitfalls. I would highly recommend that people get hold of a copy as it makes a very clear case for the importance of designing and making things both physically and on computers whilst addressing some of the concerns.As I tinker with my own understanding of the potential of design thinking and making in the classroom number of potential pitfalls seem to need to be addressed:1) Empty Creativity: Matthew Crawford in The Case for Working with your Hands (published in the US as Shop Class as Soulcraft) makes the point that Einstein was not a creative physicist in isolation from being a highly knowledgeable one. "Creativity" Crawford argues "is the by product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice." (p51). As we empower students to to come up with creative solutions and creative problems how do we also ensure that they are becoming skilled at using the tools, both physical and mental, they need to solve that problems. Unless carefully structured we run the dangour of creating a group of frustrated students who know that if they'd ever learnt to programme or to solder or to saw they would be able to solve something. Even more worryingly creating students who are not frustrated by this and feel the goal is to talk about what you would do if you ever learnt any skills. How do we ensure that there is the necessary rigour so that creating something is not the end. Creating and building something that genuinely works should be the goal.2) Abdication of responsibility by teachers: One common pitfall of inquiry based teaching is hearing teachers say "I don't need to know it the children can find it out." Whilst for certain specific knowledge this is true, Martinez and Stager are very clear on this point; "In case we have been to subtle, you should learn to program,solder,build a robot or design a 3D object,especially if you expect children to." Teachers do not need to become expert in all fields of making but they need to have the curiosity to learn slightly ahead of their students.3) Learning the Design Cycle becoming more important than Designing: How do we avoid the importance becoming knowing the phases of the design cycle over and above being able to design.This is the flip side to point 2 how do we ensure that teachers don't become overly prescriptive and make design thinking about an abstract thinking process rather than physical designing and building. 4) Students not thinking deeply about making: The Agency by Design projectis trying to link the Project Zero Work on thinking with the Maker movement and talk about giving students agency to have the knowledge skills and understandings to design effectively. Martinez and Stager argue that "Making is a way of documenting the thinking of a learner in a shareable artefact." How will teachers become skilled at understanding and enabling the thinking process of a student engaged in making and tinkering?I am excited by the potential for a truly rounded learning experience that Design Thinking and the Maker Movement offers but wary that without great teachers and great teacher training it may well not live up to that potential.

Some colleagues of mine have just returned for a Beyond Laptops Conference at Yokohama International School. One of the things they brought back from this was a discussion of Ruben Puentedura's SAMR model of technological innovation. This model describes four levels of technological innovation;Substitution, AugmentationModificationRedefinitionThe first of these two levels are seen as being enhancement and the final two as transformative. Puentedura describes this process far more effectively than I could in the video linked to below and in a pdf found on his website and linked here.

Recently, and somewhat belatedly, I read Seymour Papert's 1981 book Mindstorms.I was struck how, despite huge changes in technology and countless very expensive technological innovations, many of the changes he envisioned have still not come to pass.I think that the TPACK model mentioned in the video provides a strong clue as to why this is so. This model argues that truly effective technological innovation occurs when a teacher is combining a high level of pedagogical knowledge with both technical and content knowledge. Too often schools make the critical error of viewing the tool as the pedagogy and its presence in school as an end in itself. Looking at many school's websites you will see phrases such as "We are a 1:1 Laptop school" or an "ipad school" etc. It is much less common to have schools who outline why they have the technology or what they are doing with it.

In order to help school's to do clarify their purpose in introducing technological innovation I have created a Digital Usage Review template based on the recent NESTA report Decoding Learning: The proof, promise and potential of digital educationI would suggest that for technology to live up to its transformational promise educators must be able to have clarity about the following questions, which for want of a better name, (suggestions welcome) I'll refer to as:Pinchbeck's 3 P's of Technological Potential

1) What do I hope the technology will achieve in terms of my students learning?(PURPOSE)2)How am I going to make critical pedagogical decisions about the use of technology?(PEDAGOGY)3)How will I ensure my own knowledge of technology,pedagogy and my curriculum enables me to choose the correct tool to achieve my aims? (PREPARATION)Educational Technology remains a truly exciting vehicle to enable students to expand their thinking and present their understanding in ways that have profound meaning to them. However if educators don't engage deeply with the purpose of technology and the pedagogy it supports, the full potential of technology will remain unrealised for another generation.

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AuthorMy name is Derek Pinchbeck. I am the Learning and Teaching Adviser for English Schools Foundation in Hong Kong. For the last 25 years I have been teaching in International Schools around the World. During my teaching career I have been fascinated by the question "How do we get students to think and create with what they know?" This blog is a collection of some of my thoughts as I strive to answer that question.